The passing away of a human being is a somber occurrence. The rituals and customs surrounding the death of a human being demand dignity and sensitivity for the sake of those who were closest to the deceased person. The burial of human remains, in a funeral ritual, is regarded in many religions as an act of tremendous importance. A funeral is a ceremony for celebrating, sanctifying, or remembering the life of a person who has died. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember the dead, from interment itself, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honor. These customs vary widely between cultures, and between religious affiliations within cultures. Regardless of these variations, funerary customs are as old as the human culture itself.
After a person dies, it is common for people to seek information about the life of the deceased, often gathering such information to share with family members and/or those who were closest to the deceased. Living people seeking such information about a deceased person in many cases must do a substantial amount of research to gather such information, for example to make a family album, or write a biography of the person. Such information provides a source of both comfort and closure to those who were closest to the deceased. However, gathering such information is often a difficult endeavor because families, friends, coworkers, and others have different information about the deceased person and public records are not often sources of complete or cohesive collections of information in the case of most individuals. Further, if a first person gathers a substantial amount of information about a deceased person, it is not always apparent to a second person seeking essentially the same information that it has been gathered, in part or in whole, by the first person.
If a substantial amount of information regarding a deceased person were easily available and accessible by family members and potentially other interested parties, the information would potentially be widely accessed. If individuals have to hunt down information and notify family members that, for example, a family album of memories regarding a deceased family member is available, the information would be less widely known and accessed. Therefore, it is desirable for such information to be directly ascertainable by those seeking it from a single, widely accessible source. The advent of the World Wide Web has enabled such direct access to information. Online web pages are used as a repository for categorized and easily accessible information. Many people set up and maintain web pages that serve as memorials to deceased family members and loved ones; alternatively, registries have been generated wherein a family member or loved one can reserve a “page” for such a digital memorial; for example, FACEBOOK® (Facebook Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., at www.facebook.com) can be used for this purpose. Digitized pictures, stories provided by family and friends, memorials, biographical information, video recordings, audio recordings, and the like are easily uploaded and accessed by others. The content of such online registries can, if desired, be restricted to those provided with a user name and password (or an established identity, in the case of social media such as FACEBOOK®) to gain entry to the website or to certain content within the website. This provides a tailorable level of access to a family's private information about a deceased.
Additional means to access and provide such digital memorial information in a “package” have been set forth, wherein a person visiting a cemetery can gain direct access to memorial information about a deceased person buried within. For example, Toothman, U.S. Pat. No. 7,395,960 teaches a system for providing memorial information about a deceased party at a cemetery location. The system includes a memory device affixed to an object at the cemetery—such as a tombstone—and including on-board memory in the form of e.g. a random access memory. A person with a handheld device can access the on-board memory to retrieve the information from the memory device. Where the memory device includes e.g. random access memory, the information thereon can be modified, updated, and so forth. Similarly, Mindrum, U.S. Pat. No. 7,222,120 describes a registry system for deceased persons, including a computer, a concrete memorial, an online registry service containing information about the deceased person, and a “good” or a “tag”, e.g. a bar code. The tag is affixed to the concrete memorial or a location nearby, wherein the identifier notifies visitors that information related to the deceased person is available in the online registry service. Then a handheld device such as a cell phone can be used to interpret the identifier and retrieve memorial information about the deceased person buried nearby.
Recently, the memorialization industry has begun to adopt such technology by attaching quick response codes, or “QR codes” directly to tombstones and the like within cemetery locations. QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that contain information allowing a person with a smartphone to scan the code and provide a link to online information about the deceased. QR codes are widely adopted elsewhere to provide links, in similar fashion, to advertisements, social media pages, and so forth.
Devices such as QR codes, memory devices, and the like, while useful for achieving the purpose of providing an on-site link for cemetery visitors to information about a deceased person, detract from the dignity and aesthetics of a burial site. Many people are unwilling to affix on the gravesite of a loved one what appears to be a link to an advertisement or to social media. Thus, there remains a substantial need to provide access to digital memorial information in a format wherein a person visiting a cemetery can gain direct access to memorial information about deceased persons buried within, without having a separate or unique device attached to a tombstone or near the physical grave location.